You may have seen
this well known image of
Cleveland Jewish life in the
early 1900s in
"Merging
Traditions",
2004
edition, a book
students of
Cleveland
Jewish history
should own.

It shows most of the
nearly 200 members
of Local 1750 United
Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners assembled on the steps in front of
Congregation Oheb
Zedek at Scovill
Avenue and East 38th
Street. They were
Jewish carpenters,
and their banner
displayed a Magen
David symbol.

It is Monday,
September 4, 1911.
Wearing their white
uniforms they would
soon join with more
than 10,000 other
working men and
women in the Labor
Day parade.

Oheb Zedek (lovers
of righteousness)
was founded by
members
wanting to remain
Orthodox who left
when
B'nai Jeshurun decided to become
Conservative. Built in 1905,
the building
is now
the home of the
Triedstone Baptist
Church.

Why did Jewish
carpenters have
their own local?
It may have been
only partly to get
more work, assuming
that other locals
might not give Jews
a fair share of work
assignments, or in
the hope that Jewish
builders would
contact their local.

These were times
when ethnicity was a
major social
dimension. Many of
these men,
possibly nearly all
of them, would have
been first
generation Americans
whose primary
language was
Yiddish. Having
their
own local let them
conduct business in
their native tongue
and also to create
community. There
were locals for
other ethnicities,
such as Czech and
German.

Is
Local 1750 still
active? Searches
of the Plain
Dealer archive
show it was active
in 1981 when its
president Alfred
Antenucci, then 68,
was at the scene of
John Hinckley's
attempted
assassination of
President Ronald
Reagan. He struck
Hinckley and took
him to the ground.
Nearly all articles
after 1981 are about
Mr. Antenucci or
are death notices
of Local 1750 members, some of
whom had become home
builders. The
regional union
council website does not
list Local 1750.

We learn that in 1935 there
was a Carpenters Hall on
Kinsman and East 135th St.
We see Local 1750 ads in
each
High Holy Days issue, and
again on
Passover, the most widely
observed Jewish holiday, when
secular Jews join in
celebrating freedom from
slavery and the founding of
a people.

Local 1750's
address is first 3946 Lee
Road, then in 1969 becomes
2176 Lee. In 1977 it is 3615
Chester Avenue, suggesting
it has been combined with
other locals. We show the
last ad, which ran in
September 1988.

The last CJN
obituary to mention the
deceased as having been a member of the
carpenters union appeared in
2006.

Thanks to
Jeffrey Morris we know that
the Jewish Carpenters Union
had been at 2226 East 55th
Street before it bought the
Kinsman Road property in
1925. Names on the
transfer and mortgage
documents he sent me include Meiyr Barbash, Moritz Berko,
Max Goldman, Anne Gottlieb,
Jacob Marks and Morris Zind.

In its day
East 55th Street had a
concentration of Jewish
institutions, like East
105th Street had 20 years later. The
carpenters building was
near Tifereth Israel, B'nai
Jeshurun, the Yiddishe Velt
and
more. Most who left
that area moved northeast to
Glenville, but union members
tended to head southeast to
Kinsman
-
Mount Pleasant.

Carpenters Hall still stands
at 13503 Kinsman Avenue in
Cleveland, at
the northeast corner of East
135th Street and Kinsman.
The entrance to the
auditorium was on the East
136th side of the building. On the south side of the
street is the former Council
Educational Alliance
building, a stop on some of
Nate Arnold's tours. For decades these
buildings and the
Kinsman Jewish Center
were places for
Jews to gather in
the neighborhood, which in the
1930s was a largely working
class area, about 20 percent
Jewish.

The first Plain Dealer
mention of this address is
for a political meeting in
1928 at Carpenters Hall. In
1960 stories call it the
Allied Industrial Workers
Hall.
The last listed owner of the
building, which has been
vacant for years, was a bible
college. On the
front door of the boarded up
building is a
Cuyahoga County Land Bank notice of
asbestos abatement dated
September 23, 2014, days before
these photos were taken.
Asbestos removal is required before a building is
demolished.

On Friday
afternoon October 17, 2014 I
sent an email to a staff
member at the Maltz Museum.
It included the image of the
Carpenters Auditorium stone
and said "Before that
building comes down, and it
may be soon, wouldn’t it be
good to get this stone for
the museum. Might bring back
memories just as the Chibas
Jerusalem window does for
Glenville folks."

The next
morning I returned with my
camera to Kinsman Avenue
between East 135th and 136th to take a picture of
the main entrance. Where the
building had stood just two
weeks before was a vacant
lot. The
Carpenters Union Building
has been demolished. All
that remains is a small pile
of rubble - and the memories
of thousands of Jews,
Italians and others.